Birth related injuries are rare but devastating events because the consequences can lead to lifelong impairment for the baby, family and society in general. During labor, clinical staff monitors various health characteristics of the obstetrics patients in order to obtain a qualitative assessment of the mother's and the fetus's well-being. The clinical staff uses visual methods to study the heart rate tracings of the fetus and mother and the measurements and relies on their experience to deduce the degree of maternal and fetal well being and to assess whether labour is progressing normally. Low incidence-high consequence injuries are particularly challenging to prevent. Because of their rarity, it is difficult for clinicians to remain vigilant, to develop substantial experience with them and to maintain the appropriate skills. Over-caution can result in a high rate of unnecessary interventions in the majority of patients who are not at risk for the rare adverse event.
In addition, several working conditions known to promote error in judgement are prevalent in obstetrics. Fatigue, a well-known error producing condition, is common. Frequent false alarms, because the warning signs are numerous and nonspecific, lead to complacency and missed recognition of a true problem. Workload is unpredictable and heavy demands may divert the teams focus from a developing problem. The required assessments are numerous and complex. Clinicians must integrate many pieces of information pertaining to both the mother and the baby's conditions, over prolonged periods of time, communicate their assessments clearly among team members and implement corrective measures before it is too late. Moreover, the conditions present in one birth may be quite different from another such that a particular observation may be normal under one set of circumstances and abnormal for another.
Although many metrics have been developed, a deficiency associated with existing approaches to labour monitoring is that they do not provide suitable functionality for allowing the clinical staff to effectively manage and make use of the large amount of information gathered during labour progression. As such, the clinical staff is frequently overloaded with information. This overload of information often obscures the more crucial facts and makes critical information difficult to discern. To date, there exists no suitable tool or system for allowing the clinical staff to view a concise representation of labour progression for an obstetrics patient.
In the context of the above, there is a need in the industry to provide a method and device for displaying data conveying labor related information for an obstetrics patient that alleviates at least in part problems associated with the existing methods and devices.